We played Sea Of Thieves for nine months. Here's our verdict...

I left the final day of last year’s E3 with tears of laughter in my eyes and ocean salt in my hair. I had just played Sea Of Thieves – only a twenty minute burst, but in that time this latest open world co-op pirate game from legendary developer Rare won me over.

Fast forward nine months and countless beta sessions and I’m concerned. I love a huge amount about Sea Of Thieves – the way it looks, the way it sounds, the atmosphere it captures, the freedom it invites, the familiar structures it eschews. I love the way it takes exploration and distills that down to its purest thrills – grab a cutlass, prep your compass and hoist anchor for the next treasure island. I love that I get to inhabit a peg-legged but loveable scumbag and sail through storms in what has to be the most gorgeously rendered ocean ever in a video game. I just don’t love how quickly that the freeform adventure becomes unsurprising.

It isn’t that it’s boring – not at all. The entire setup of the game is designed to give you an open sandbox in which to adventure and cause mischief either alone or with up to three friends. Playing alone (the worst way to play) or with one friend puts you in a smaller ship, while parties of three and four (the best way to play) will get to pirate a full sized galleon. It’s a smart structure that means you’re always capable of manning the various parts of the vessel but it's challenging enough that communication is vital. Steering, manning the anchor, firing the cannons, adjusting the sails, patching up any holes from damage and shifting water from the hull, even playing lookout – it’s all important to survival.

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At its best Sea Of Thieves delivers some incredible moments. One quest I played went awry – two friends and I were looting an island under the dead of night, when another crew of players turned up. They decimated us, using the darkness to take us by surprise. Once we respawned, though, we changed tack. Dousing all of the lights on our ship we sneakily sailed up behind them and climb aboard, using their own ambush tactics against them to take the loot they plundered off us before using a gunpowder barrel to sink their sloop to the depths.

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Rare’s deft touch delivers one of the best looking games on Xbox right now, regardless of whether you’re on a standard console or the graphical powerhouse that is the Xbox One X. It’s colourful, cartoon fun that looks stunning in motion and blends hand-drawn styling and photorealism to hit the mark. From the sunlight beating down on the soft textured wooden deck, to the lush vegetation of a desert island, to the way the water swells and swirls so convincingly you won’t stop looking at it in awe. I’m 10-hours in and I’m still blown away by it.

Across the game’s three main factions, you’ll complete countless procedurally generated Voyages (quests), which increase in complexity each time you reach certain benchmarks. First there’s the Gold Hoarders, whose voyages entail using a treasure map to figure out which island you need to head to, before getting there unscathed and digging at the spot that’s marked X. Voila! You’ll dig up treasure chests which you can take back to the various outposts across the world for gold.

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Then there’s the Order Of Souls, who have you battling the undead crews of legendary ships. Doing so gets you the cursed skull of a dead pirate captain – again, you trade it for gold. Lastly, there’s the Merchant Alliance. All of the above stays the same, structurally, apart from the fact your main objective is bringing specific goodies – be that chickens, or pigs or barrels of spices – back to your outpost. They’re all glorified fetch quests.

The real fun comes from the madness that can emerge before, during and after quests. Sadly, while that idea is lovely in principle, Sea Of Thieves’ foundations simply aren’t multifaceted enough to make those jaunts between islands, or random encounters with other players, as varied as they need to be to sustain interest beyond the opening 10 - 15 hours. Rare has come out and said that this isn’t the finished game, per se – they will update and add to it for years to come. While that fills me with hope, there’s not a huge amount of content at launch.

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Every island you find has the same two or three different animals. All of the enemies are the same – literally, just undead skeletons. There’s nothing to interact with beyond barrels full of cannonballs, bananas and wooden planks, all of which play a major role in naval combat, general survival and repairing your ship. Even the huge Kraken – a rare, random boss that can appear in the seas – has turned out to be an array of flailing tentacles without any actual body in the ocean itself.

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So while the world looks amazing and feels great to be a part of, you’re never really interacting with much – even the mysterious caves and nooks you find ultimately lead to nothing. Perhaps a piece of environmental storytelling – a skull totem, or a cave drawing. Many will say that this is Rare going back to the roots of older style games, without needing to rely on constant hand holding or level ups, but the idea that the game is offsetting any responsibility of offering things to do onto the imagination of its players is crazy.

Ultimately, with with no meaningful progression system (all of Sea of Thieves’ quests give you only gold, and the upgrades you buy with that gold are purely cosmetic), the sense of satisfaction and progression feels slight.

While some of the best moments of the game have been when I’ve been in a rainstorm while exchanging cannonballs with a passing ship; I’ve also spent time being griefed by other players who just repeatedly kill me – not for my stuff, just because they can. Piracy is piracy and it’s par for the course, but the lack of repercussions for the aggressor is a big gap in the moral fabric of Sea of Thieves’ world.

So, I’m disappointed. But hopeful – as with other ambitious open worlds like No Man’s Sky and Elite: Dangerous, [I]Sea Of Thieves[/i] is setting sail without a huge amount on offer. But, just like those games, what is in place right now is an extremely solid framework of ideas and atmosphere for Rare to improve upon in the coming months. It’s one of the most charming and unapologetically endearing games I’ve played in years, but it also feels like maybe one of the most naive. Still, the joyous breath of sea air it delivers is just about enough to overcome the ankle-depth shallowness of these spectacular seas.